Today, in Algeria, the execution
and murder of women, foreigners and intellectuals by Muslim extremists have
become systematic. Such typically fascist acts have given rise to feelings of
outrage. Logically, therefore, one would expect that the most lucid would rally
around a struggle against such a political vision or, at the very least, in
defense of the memory of the victims. Instead, in the French left-wing press it
is not uncommon to read harsh criticism about the role of those intellectuals
who remain in Algeria and their assassination evokes little
compassion.

Two Lines
of Argument Underlie the Attitudes of Such Critics

1) By working in their
country, especially in the institutions of the state, these men and women,
journalists, professors, school principals and deans of universities, lawyers
and physicians, have put themselves at the service of a system which is brutally
repressive, unjust and corrupt. By accepting to be functionaries they are deemed
to have joined the category of 'the enemy of the people', and therefore, their
physical elimination seems justifiable.

2) In addition these
intellectuals live cut-off from the people, no longer sharing the lifestyles or
values of the people, nor do they represent any real social force.

Whereas to me, an ordinary
witness of events since 1962, these arguments, which are presented as being
self-evident, appear to be highly debatable and, in my opinion, there is an
urgent need to question them.

In response to the first
set of accusations, a simple historical contextualization will help us analyze
the concept of 'serving the state'. In 1962 when, after eight years of war,
Algeria gained independence, the Algerians deeply desired to serve their
country; i.e., to breathe life into the state for which they had
fought.

Even
though the state rapidly turned out to be undemocratic, the majority of educated
citizens desired to participate in the process of building up the country - to
open schools, to provide health care for the people, to build what was necessary
- in short, to fight against the misery and ignorance inherited from the
colonial period. While there is no doubt that the initial enthusiasm provided an
alibi for an abusive power, this too needs to be seen in perspective. The
Algerian government did not always have the negative image it possesses today;
in the eyes of the people, certain proposed projects did enjoy legitimacy (in
particular, the mass literacy and free health care programmes).

To the second series of
accusations, one can respond with the following: it is true that by nature
intellectuals are attracted to values which are not dependant on religion but is
this reason enough to conclude that they are alienated from people's concerns
and incapable of mobilizing support as the Islamist fundamentalists
do?

How is an
Algerian intellectual different from a Japanese intellectual, or from his
Russian or Canadian counterpart? To be an intellectual requires a conscious
breaking away from social norms. Conducting research in archaeology, working in
molecular biology, unravelling the mysteries of the manuscripts of the 12th
century mathematicians of Bajai'a, all imply an existence devoted to the
disciplined pursuit of rational and systematic knowledge and this life is not
the life of the male peasant, nor that of the woman worker assembling television
sets. Are we comfortably and passively resigned to the division of labour? How?
The division of labour - an old debate - is outrageous if it is not based on the
principle of competence. What is deplorable here is not that there are
intellectuals in laboratories but that all those who could have moved up the
ladder, because of their intrinsic ability and their willingness to work, did
not have the opportunity to do so. However, over the last thirty years, despite
facing difficulties of all sorts, some people did nevertheless emerge with minds
open to the problems of knowledge, to those of the world, to those of their
country. Thankfully they did not disappear into the peasantry, much to the
vexation of the anachronistic Maoists. Bravo to the doggedly determined
generation of first teachers who shattered the ignorance into which the people
were plunged during the colonial period. Let us not become party to the process
directed against intellectuals under all darkened skies. Finally, by what right
have certain confused minds appropriated the people's question in order to
condemn the vital and lifesaving exercise of intelligence!

Let us denounce, and
quickly so, another aspect of this criticism: that is that the finer
sensibilities of the intellectuals find the simplicity of the people
intolerable. How does this classification function here? Let us examine the
concept. We come up with three possible variations:

a) The people are simple
just as childhood is simple (oh Freud!) and they are becoming good little people
- unpolished and naïve; or else,

b) The people are simple,
as in simple-minded, and naturally they show themselves incapable of any
understanding, in short they are simpletons. If an intellectual is the one who
writes and publishes his ideas, who could have written this sinister and
paternalistic nonsense? Do we find these in the texts of sociologists like
Liabes, or psychiatrists like Boucebci?

c) Thirdly, it is possible
that the people are simple in the sense of possessing a deep rustic simplicity
that intuitively (Ah, long live intuition! Down with reasoning!), senses the
real values, those which one can immediately trust; values rooted in the land,
in race, in blood and in implicit identity. Well there, yes, we are up against a
dangerous simplicity as it has its roots in popular superstition and serves as a
refuge for the ideas of the extreme right. Since Spinoza, we can no longer
ignore the fact that populist thought flirts with superstition; the mode of
prejudice swayed by its passions, clinging to symbols or to effects rather than
focusing on root causes. The Algerian people are no less susceptible than others
to this chimera and Algerian intellectuals must guard the people against such
spontaneity.

Let us ask a first
question. How would putting the intellectuals on trial change the historical
situation? How would it help in comprehending the continuum of reality, the
singular depth of the use of violence (of all types - physical, political and
symbolic) in Algerian society?

And now let us ask a second
question: what is in fact the relationship between Islamist fundamentalism and
the people and how do we define the symbiosis between the FIS and the people? It
is true that the bulk of the FIS cadre and supporters - consisting of all those
who were left alienated and excluded at the fault of the education policies in
the 70s - live close to the people, but we are never told about the nature of
this union nor how it functions. They make us believe in a political idyll and
if we doubt it, we become agents of the government, a part of the nomenklatura.
Let us try instead to understand the basis of the relationship between FIS and
the people.

The
essential factors which drive this relationship are physical violence (it is
pointless to describe this, it is dazzlingly clear), corruption (oh yes!) -
hidden but nonetheless real (buying votes at elections, 150 dinars for a pro-FIS
vote, the equivalent of a day's work; the use of positions in the administration
for distributing favours), and finally through prohibitions - the royal way of
hijacking minds - a method which is best implemented in the mosques, schools,
colleges and universities; wherever the youth are.

In a religion of
purification such as Islam, it is easy for a threatening preacher to manipulate
the licit and the illicit (the 'yadjouz' and the 'la yadjouz'). Let us consider
a few practical examples of these injunctions. From now on, going to the
hamman (public baths) is unworthy of believers because it involves
nudity. This is no minor injunction. It means that personal hygiene becomes
impossible. How do you clean yourself properly in our overcrowded apartments,
where the people are too poor to install a water tank to overcome the frequent
cut-offs in the water supply? This ban has also abolished a centuries-old
tradition of community living. The joyous and occasionally steamy promiscuity of
the hamman was like a party, a respite from life's daily worries. Even
the most secluded woman had the inalienable right of having a bath once a month
in order to purify herself but henceforth the hamman, a secular place of
purification, has been converted into a source of impurity.

In the same context of day
to day living women have been forbidden to wear makeup. This strikes at the
heart of popular Arab culture. Which women, no matter how poor, would like to
come out without her eyes made up, without a hint of perfume? The sophisticated
tradition of personal care and beauty that the people managed to preserve in
their daily lives - how has it been affected by Islamist
fundamentalism?

Of course, there is a ban
on songs, especially the songs of those who have no voice, who only have access
to brothels and dives, raï music. The suffering of the wretched does not have
the right to make itself heard - that voice which, having nothing to lose, dares
express the oppression suffered in an inhuman society. For the people, Islamist
fundamentalism represents the mourning of their own history.

While these bans distort
the meaning of life, others are blatantly criminal, like the one in the summer
of 1990 when there was a typhoid epidemic in one of the regions of the country.
The doctors recommended that people chlorinate water before drinking it. The
Islamist fundamentalists spread the rumour that this practice was not
permissible as it would prevent them from having children. From the
sterilization of water to genital sterilization! That's great logic.

There will of course be
retorts to these examples: we will be told that the Islamist fundamentalists are
playing an important role by helping the deprived, by helping all those whom the
exploitative state neglected; that one cannot deny. Huge amounts of foreign
financial aid, immense amounts of money from the bazaars,[1] and corruption have
enabled the establishment of a network for social aid. But shouldn't one ask
whether this is an act of charity as preached in Islam or a medium-term
political investment? I am inclined to side with the second hypothesis as these
do-gooders seem to me to be quite selective: they do not embrace all those who
are marginalised. They especially ignore those whose destitution questions the
restrictions and taboos of Algerian society (abandoned children, unwed mothers,
women who end up on the streets because of divorce, AIDS). This solicitude
defines for itself what it considers to be social priorities and can therefore
transform a child care center into a mosque (it happened in the district of
Asphodeles in the city of Algiers). Islamist fundamentalism has no intention of
resolving the enormous problems facing Algeria (demographic problems, the
chronic shortage of water, the foreign debt…). It is manipulating the desire for
justice, for the introduction of morality in public life, only to further its
own game and further confuse the issues.

One must therefore have the
courage to draw two conclusions:

a) The symbiosis of the
Islamist fundamentalists and the people is comparable to what students of
ecology study in the relationship between a parasite and its host organism, the
former lives off the strength of the latter which it exhausts slowly but surely
until the host dies; we are dealing here with a malignant
relationship.

b) If this political trend
indicates the state of misery to which the Algerian people have been reduced, it
can in no way represent the alternative that so many are hoping for.

Let us therefore refuse to
become party to the latest mystifications propagated by the populists and
demagogues who are galvanised by questionable motives; let us refuse to share
space with those who shoot at any who dare to learn and think; let us say no to
this form of bigotry; this criminal vision of God and of the world.